DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

For the many who aspire to be entrepreneurs someday, Yogesh Bansal's address today at the webinar was a great inspiration. The entrepreneur, worked on various ideas before he actually went on to start ApnaCircle.com, India's first and leading business and career networking site.

He started by saying how and why he started ApnaCircle.com in India.

Yogesh Bansal Founder & CEO, ApnaCircle.com

He lived in the US for nine years before he moved back to India in March, 2006. When he came to India he saw people here wanted to speak out. They needed a platform, however. They wanted to share things with their friends, talk about their social life, interests and so on and so forth.

This motivated him to create something that could all these elements together. Having stayed in the US, he knew of various social networking sites around the world. “I wanted to create something similar yet different. Something that could cater to the needs of India,” said Bansal.

To understand the needs of Indian better, he started researching. He prepared several questionnaires and asked people to fill them up for me.

From the answers that he received what he could gather was that two things were very important for Indians—1.) Friends and, 2.) Career. Family came third in the list.

“With the answers in my hand, I thought why not create something that caters to both social and professional sides of people,” decided Bansal. Hence, he started ApnaCircle.com.

Of course, the sailing wasn’t smooth from day one. There were lot of issues that bogged Bansal down. Getting finance was as difficult as building a team from scratch. Then he also had to take care of internet and power issues.
He decided to tackle one at a time. He didn’t hire a team at the beginning. He started by writing the codes himself. And later he hired people from tier-2 cities. That helped him cut down on the price.

Initially people didn’t understand how the business of social networking can generate money. Not many believed in the model. He made them understand it.

And it was a year after his arrival in India, in April 2007, he could successfully launch his business. ApnaCircle.com was new. Orkut and Hi5 had captured the market then.

So make it better and more useful, Bansal started taking feedback from the users. And when the suggestions by the users were implemented, they helped spread the word further. That’s how ApnaCircle.com started working.

In 2009, ApnaCircle merged with Viadeo-Tianji, the leading professional networking sites in Europe and China, to form the leading Global entity. The mergers enabled the Indian users to interact with more evolved consumers from Europe, China and other parts of the globe. Also, Unyk, a Canadian social networking site later became a part of this entity.

ApnaCircle.com is a successful and profit generating venture now.

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